Building Solo

I like Rust, and Rust is one of the languages that truly got me interested in back-end development. To be honest, three years ago I barely cared about any kind of back-end architecture — unless there was a problem that nobody else could solve for me at that moment. Even when I had a software company, I rarely felt the urge to tackle issues I could simply delegate. After all, I had good engineers around me, and it was easy to hand tasks over to them. The point is: I hated thinking about back-end — until I discovered Rust.

And it was exactly because I liked Rust that I faced another dilemma: I couldn’t really find an application where using Rust made sense. If you check my YouTube channel, you’ll see some pretty simple apps — QR code generators and similar stuff. Some of those ideas might even turn into features for other products I’m thinking about. But I kept wondering: does it make sense to build this in Rust? You could easily build it with another language that would make more sense. And I got stuck in this loop: what actually makes sense?

Time went by and I still had no idea what to build. Then one day, a real problem came up: while working on some back-end apps with Node, I had to test some routes and do regular daily debugging. I used Insomnia for that — which ended up wasting about 15 minutes of my day just to log back into the app, deal with like 10 updates from their software, all while I just wanted to debug a specific route and run a few tests.

At the end of the day, I thought: that’s it! I’m going to build my own HTTP client. I didn’t know when, but I knew it would be with Rust. That’s when Tauri came along, and with its version 2 I decided to go all-in to make it happen. I set my mind that this would be a long-term project, not something for a weekend hackathon. But eventually, I would have my own tool — something that made sense for me. And here we are: version 0.0.13, wrapping up the documentation, building the GraphQL features, and the next step… well, that’s for the next post about Solo.

See ya!